Call for abstracts for a:

Special volume (Sonderband) of the journal "Soziale Welt":

Computational Social Science: Current Trends and State of the Art
Editors: Jan Fuhse (Leipzig), Mark Lutter (Wuppertal)


Computational Social Science (CSS) has fast become one of the most important and most innovative research strands in the social sciences (Edelmann et al. 2020). The special volume gives an overview of the state of the art, and of current CSS research. We welcome contributions from sociology, political science, media and communication studies, and other disciplines.

CSS has developed with access to new data sources since 2000 (Lazer / Radford 2017). On the one hand, texts (publications, proceedings, letters) are increasingly prepared, stored, and disseminated digitally. This allows for their analysis with tools from computer linguistics (Evans / Aceves 2016). For example, we can construct networks of concepts from their co-occurrences in documents (Carley 1994; Light 2014). Or political positions are identified on the basis of word frequencies in parliamentary debates (Slapin / Proksch 2008; Monroe et al. 2009; Fuhse et al. 2020).

On the other hand, internet and social media platforms like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter / X, and dating websites and apps have become important spaces of social interaction. Crawlers and APIs make internet communication available for research. On this basis, online interaction patterns are analyzed, e.g., the ideological separation of politics in the U.S. (Adamic / Glance 2005), the interaction dynamics in e-mail exchanges (Kossinets / Watts 2009) and in online dating (Lewis 2013), the formation of friendships and the diffusion of information on Facebook (Wimmer / Lewis 2010; Bakshy et al. 2012), the spreading of protest and of evaluations on Twitter (Jackson et al. 2020; Keuchenius et al. 2021), and the thematic structures and trends in online forums (Törnberg / Törnberg 2016; Farrell et al. 2019). In addition, online databases like Wikipedia, IMDB, or the web of sciences store data on offline phenomena, like the unequal access to collaboration networks for male and female actors (Lutter 2015), the success of movies by their classification in genres (Keuschnigg / Wimmer 2017) or of sociologists by their specialization (Heiberger et al. 2021).

Overall, social scientists now have access to digitized non-reactive and process-generated behavioral data. Its analysis requires new methods from formal network analysis, computer science, and computer linguistics. CSS thus becomes a "trading zone" between the disciplines (McFarland et al. 2016: 24ff). Social scientists bring research questions, contextual knowledge, and theoretical background into the collaboration with computer scientists, mathematicians, linguists, and physicists (Maasen / Passoth 2020). The new methods of CSS rapidly become part of curricula in social science M.S. programs and graduate schools.

The CSS methods (r)evolution centers less on individuals as statistical units with attributes or with their subjective meaning. The focus now lies on relations and networks, communicative meanings, and dynamics of interaction (Lewis 2024). On the one hand, the aim is to reconstruct interaction patterns, as in the statistical analysis of event sequences (Kossinets / Watts 2009; Lewis 2013) or in the formal analysis of networks of contacts, citations, or retweets (Wimmer / Lewis 2010; Jackson et al. 2020; Keuchenius et al. 2021).

On the other hand, CSS studies map culture with quantitative text analysis / natural language processing (NLP; Kozlowski et al. 2019; Stoltz / Taylor 2021). For example, machine learning techniques like topic models or word embeddings identify key themes and developments over time. They allow comparing cultural contexts, e.g., the feminist discourses in Chicago and New York City (Nelson 2021). These studies contribute to the current discussion on "measuring culture" (Mohr et al. 2020).

But how can quantitative tools identify, even "understand" cultural patterns? Lee and Martin (2015) consider NLP less "subjective" and error-prone than the classification by human coders. More recent works claims that it is necessary to complement CSS methods with qualitative interpretation (Schneijderberg et al. 2022). This includes validating quantitative models (Nelson 2020), exploring unusual patterns (Brandt / Timmermans 2021), and the in-depth interpretation of text passages quantitatively identified as relevant (Mohr et al. 2013).

CSS studies are by now very prominent in international discourse. Many have been published in flagship journals like the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review, but also in core interdisciplinary journals Science, Nature, and PNAS. They garner less attention in German-speaking social sciences. Partly, this derives from the international publication of prominent studies (often in international collaboration; Brandt / Timmermans 2021; Edelmann et al. 2020; Fuhse et al. 2020; Heiberger et al. 2021; Keuschnigg / Wimmer 2017; Lutter 2015; Mützel 2023; Schwemmer / Wieczorek 2020; Stuhler 2021).

The special volume aims at promoting the methods and opportunities of CSS. We are looking for manuscripts (in English) that:
- discuss current developments and methods in CSS;
- reflect on the role of CSS in the social sciences, with differences to other approaches and with connections to theoretical traditions;
- document state-of-the-art research projects that answer original research questions;
- give overviews of CSS projects even if their results have partly been published before.

Since the special volume aims at a wider audience, we would like contributions to cut down on technical language and specialized CSS discussions. Rather, central methods and results should be presented accessibly to a wider academic public.

The articles in the special volume are solicited in a two-step process:
1. We invite extended abstracts of about one or two pages for prospective contributions. These abstracts should clearly state (a) the research question / aims, (b) data and (c) methods (if applicable), and briefly sketch the results and interpretation (if already available). Please send your abstracts until March 15, 2025, to Jan Fuhse jan@fuhse.net and Mark Lutter lutter@uni-wuppertal.de.
2. Subject to positive evaluation, we issue invitations for full papers until October 1, 2025.
3. We plan on organizing a workshop (potentially in Leipzig on July 10/11) to discuss early versions of the manuscripts, giving time for subsequent modifications.
4. The submitted papers will be subject to double-blind peer review.
5. Publication of accepted papers: spring 2026.

References:
Adamic, Lada / Natalie Glance 2005: "The political blogosphere and the 2004 US election: divided they blog" Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Link discovery, 36-43.
Bakshy, Eytan / Itamar Rosenn / Cameron Marlow / Lada Adamic 2012: "The role of social networks in information diffusion" Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web, 519-528.
Brandt, Philipp / Stefan Timmermans 2021: "Abductive Logic of Inquiry for Quantitative Research in the Digital Age" Sociological Science 8, 191-210.
Carley, Kathleen 1994: "Extracting Culture Through Textual Analysis" Poetics 22 (4): 291-312.
Edelmann, Achim / Tom Wolff / Danielle Montagne / Christopher Bail 2020: "Computational Social Science and Sociology" Annual Review of Sociology 46, 24.1-24.21.
Evans, James / Pedro Aceves 2016: "Machine Translation: Mining Text for Social Theory" Annual Review of Sociology 42, 21-50.
Farrell, Tracie / Miriam Fernandez / Jakub Nowotny / Harith Alani 2019: "Exploring Misogyny across the Manosphere in Reddit" WebSci '19, 87-96.
Fuhse, Jan / Oscar Stuhler / Jan Riebling / John Levi Martin 2020: "Relating Social and Symbolic Relations in Quantitative Text Analysis. A Study of Parliamentary Discourse in the Weimar Republic" Poetics 78, Article 101363, 1-17.
Heiberger, Raphael / Sebastian Munoz-Najar Galvez, Daniel A McFarland 2021: "Facets of specialization and its relation to career success: An analysis of US Sociology, 1980 to 2015" American Sociological Review 86, 1164-1192.
Jackson, Sarah / Moya Bailey / Brooke Foucault Welles 2020: #Hashtag Activism, Harvard / Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Keuchenius, Anna / Petter Törnberg / Justus Uitermark 2021: "Why it is important to consider negative ties when studying polarized debates: A signed network analysis of a Dutch cultural controversy on Twitter" PloS one 16 (8).
Keuschnigg, Marc / Thomas Wimmer 2017: "Is Category Spanning Truly Disadvantageous? New Evidence from Primary and Secondary Movie Markets" Social Forces 96, 449-479.
Kossinets, Gueorgi / Duncan Watts 2009: "Origins of Homophily in an Evolving Social Network" American Journal of Sociology 115, 405-450.
Kozlowski, Austin / Matt Taddy / James Evans 2019: "The Geometry of Culture: Analyzing the Meanings of Class through Word Embeddings" American Sociological Review 84(5), 905-949.
Lazer, David / Jason Radford 2017: "Data ex Machina: Introduction to Big Data" Annual Review of Sociology 43, 19-39.
Lee, Monica / John Levi Martin 2015: "Coding, counting and cultural cartography" American Journal of Cultural Sociology 3(1), 1-33.
Lewis, Kevin 2013: "The Limits of Racial Prejudice" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110 (47), 18814-18819.
Lewis, Kevin 2024: "Digital networks: Elements of a theoretical framework" Social Networks 77, 31-42.
Light, Ryan 2014: "From Words to Networks and Back: Digital Text, Computational Social Science, and the Case of Presidential Inaugural Addresses" Social Currents 1 (2): 111-129.
Lutter, Mark 2015: "Do Women Suffer from Network Closure? The Moderating Effect of Social Capital on Gender Inequality in a Project-Based Labor Market, 1929 to 2010" American Sociological Review 80, 329-358.
Maasen, Sabine / Jan-Hendrik Passoth 2020: "Soziologie Des Digitalen - Digitale Soziologie?" Soziale Welt - Sonderband 23. Baden-Baden: Nomos.
McFarland, Daniel / Kevin Lewis / Amir Goldberg 2016: "Sociology in the era of big data: The ascent of forensic social science" The American Sociologist 47, 12-35.
Mohr, John / Christopher Bail / Margaret Frye / Jennifer Lena / Omar Lizardo / Terence McDonnell / Ann Mische / Iddo Tavory / Frederick Wherry 2020: Measuring Culture, New York: Columbia University Press.
Mohr, John / Robin Wagner-Pacifici / Ronald Breiger 2013: "Graphing the grammar of motives in U.S. National Security Strategies: Cultural interpretation, automated text analysis and the drama of global politics" Poetics 43(6), 670-700.
Monroe, Burt / Michael Colaresi / Kevin Quinn 2009: "Fighting Words: Lexical Feature Selection and Evaluation for Identifying the Content of Political Conflict" Political Analysis 16, 372-403.
Mützel, Sophie 2023: Making Sense; Markets from Stories in New Breast Cancer Therapeutics, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Nelson, Laura 2020: "Computational Grounded Theory: A Methodological Framework" Sociological Methods and Research 49(1), 3-42.
Nelson, Laura 2021: "Cycles of Conflict, a Century of Continuity: The Impact of Persistent Place-Based Political Logics on Social Movement Strategy" American Journal of Sociology 127(1), 1-59.
Schneijderberg, Christian / Oliver Wieczorek / Isabel Steinhardt 2022: Qualitative und quantitative Inhaltsanalyse: digital und automatisiert, Weinheim: Juventa.
Schwemmer, Carsten / Oliver Wieczorek 2020: "The Methodological Divide of Sociology: Evidence from Two Decades of Journal Publications" Sociology 54(1), 3-21.
Slapin, Jonathan / Sven-Oliver Proksch 2008: "A Scaling Model for Estimating Time-Series Party Positions from Texts" American Journal of Political Science 52, 705-722.
Stoltz, Dustin / Marshall Taylor 2021: "Cultural cartography with word embeddings" Poetics 88, Article 101567.
Stuhler, Oscar 2021: "What's in a category? A new approach to Discourse Role Analysis" Poetics 88, Article 101568.
Törnberg, Anton / Petter Törnberg 2016: "Muslims in social media discourse: Combining topic modeling and critical discourse analysis" Discourse, Context & Media 13, 132-142.
Wimmer, Andreas / Kevin Lewis 2010: "Beyond and Below Racial Homophily: ERG Models of a Friendship Network Documented on Facebook" American Journal of Sociology 116, 583-642.